For years, hockey players have been a muse that romance novelists turn to when they need a man with a gruff exterior and a heart of gold to seduce and charm their main characters. I wrote about the phenomenon in October, having no idea that the stick-swinging beefcakes would soon transcend books and capture the hearts of romance lovers on a massive scale that’s impacting the sport itself.

Romance novelist Tessa Bailey, who has written several steamy books featuring hockey players, told me that she sees them as modern-day “Scottish Highlanders.”

“They’re over-the-top masculine, they don’t mind fighting and they’re not worried about their appearance,” she says. “It’s sexy when a man isn’t concerned about his well-being and how he looks. He just has this passion and this drive ... throw in the fact that they fistfight, get bloody and lose teeth.”

Like Bailey, author Rachel Reid leaned into the romantic appeal of hockey players, writing eight novels about them, including the massive hit Heated Rivalry. The TV adaptation premiered on Canadian streaming service Crave in November and was its most successful original series debut of all time. It streams on HBO in the U.S., where it consistently tops the TV charts.

Over the course of six episodes, the fervor online for the steamy show featuring a romance between two closeted hockey rivals yearning for (and beefing with) each other has transformed it into an unavoidable pop-culture behemoth. In the throes of the NHL season and weeks before the 2026 Winter Olympics, hockey has never been buzzier. Here’s what to know.

Why is everyone going so nuts for ‘Heated Rivalry’?

It’s hot, for starters. There’s a lot of passion between the leads, the sweet and awkward Canadian Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and the bombastic Russian Ilya Rozanov (Conner Storrie). The sex scenes — athletic-but-romantic trysts between two men — are not something we usually see on TV. The secretive nature of their relationship yields plenty of furtive glances and quiet moments of sweetness.

There’s a lot to dissect, and thus a lot for enthusiasts to post about. Videos of scenes from the show are spliced into clips known as fan edits. They often go viral, serving as advertising for the series, making it feel unavoidable online.

Though the final episode of Season 1 aired Dec. 26, Williams and Storrie are just now beginning their U.S. press tour, appearing on talk shows like The Tonight Show and Late Night With Seth Meyers, scoring massive magazine spreads and presenting at the Golden Globes during the first few weeks of January. They’ve become breakout stars, generating viral clips and real-life crowds in a way actors rarely do these days. Their fame is so sudden, their whimsical and over-the-top personalities have not yet been tampered by media training. Their chemistry is constantly on display. We’re watching stars being born in real time.

It’s not just hot, though. It’s groundbreaking. Williams says closeted professional athletes have reached out to Reid about the representation Heated Rivalry provides, and she passes the messages along to the people involved with the show. As the Athletic reports, the NHL isn’t considered a particularly friendly space for the LGBTQ community. People hope the show can change that — especially as it inspires an influx of real-life hockey fans.

From the small screen to the ‘boy aquarium’

The passion for Heated Rivalry is bleeding into real-life rinks. Fans are showing up to games in shirts that reference the series. Teams are starting to reference the show on their social media accounts and on jumbotrons. Longtime hockey fans say they’re thrilled to see so many new people interested in the sport; it’s even inspired some of them to check out Heated Rivalry.

“There are so many ways to get hooked on hockey and, in the NHL’s 108-year history, this might be the most unique driver for creating new fans,” a league representative told the Hollywood Reporter in December. “See you all at the rink.”

Elle Kennedy’s bestselling Off Campus series, which first came out in 2015 and follows the elite members of a hockey team in their search for love, is often credited with starting the hockey romance trend. (A Prime Video adaptation is expected out in 2026.) There’s been a steady flow of similar ultra-popular books since then, like Icebreaker by Hannah Grace and the Pucking Wrong series by C.R. Jane.

Romance is so often dismissed as feminine and incompatible with something so masculine and brutish as hockey, but this isn’t even the first time fans of the former bled into the latter. According to data shared with Yahoo by Wattpad, a social platform where authors share original fiction and fan fiction, the number of stories tagged as hockey romance increased 300% in 2021. During the 2021-22 NHL season, female viewership on cable TV rose by 61%.

Fans who get into the sport because of romance media often do so with, let’s be honest, elevated levels of thirst. Some refer to the rinks as “boy aquariums,” tapping the glass to get the attention of players and hollering for the particularly attractive ones.

This behavior has been condemned by some, when said hollering escalates to what critics believe to be sexual harassment. In 2023, Felicia Weeren, the wife of then-Seattle Kraken player Alex Wennberg, spoke out about how people were talking about her husband online and at games, calling it predatory and exploitative. Some have criticized the “boy aquarium” trend as playing into stereotypes of female sports fans, reducing the players to objects of desire.

But, if the point of the hockey romance genre is to humanize hunky men and recruit new devotees to the sport, is it so bad to indulge in a little respectful thirst? Especially given that the whole appeal of hockey romance is to see these rugged ice gladiators as complex, loving partners capable of change and deep emotional vulnerability. The best thing we can do is keep talking about it.